Inviting the members of our global community to share their Zabbix dashboards with us prompted a flood of fascinating responses, and we’re highlighting a few of the most interesting submissions here on our blog. This week’s entry comes to us from Nyein Chan Zaw, who is based in Bangkok, Thailand and works as an Infrastructure Specialist for Green Will Solution. Read on to see how he uses his Zabbix dashboard to monitor a highly intricate infrastructure in real time.
I appreciate the chance to share my dashboard, and I would also like to share a use case that demonstrates the practical implementation of Zabbix for real-time infrastructure monitoring.
This Zabbix dashboard provides a comprehensive view of the network’s real-time health, server availability, traffic patterns, and key performance metrics of essential infrastructure components. It is designed for monitoring production, office, and virtual server zones, including network devices, physical servers, and virtual machines. The current view is the first page of a two-page dashboard, which focuses on general network monitoring:
The second page is dedicated solely to monitoring infrastructure nodes:
Key features monitored
Traffic Monitoring: The dashboard tracks real-time traffic from critical network uplinks, including AIS and TRUE, offering visibility into bandwidth usage (e.g., 64.50 Kbps and 13.05 Kbps). It also monitors internal traffic and key devices like the FortiGate firewall, helping ensure optimal network performance and security.
Host Health Monitoring: CPU and memory utilization for top hosts (e.g., GW-WINDOW11, GW-AD-DOMAIN) are displayed, enabling efficient resource management. Alerts are triggered for high resource usage, allowing for a proactive response to performance issues.
Disk Usage: Disk space on key hosts, such as the Zabbix virtual machine and other core servers, is monitored to avoid file system over-utilization, which can lead to potential service interruptions.
Availability Overview: The dashboard provides a summary of host availability, including how many are available, unavailable, or have unknown statuses. Monitoring methods like active agent and SNMP are also shown, giving an overall view of network health.
Visual Topology Map: A detailed network map shows the production, office, virtual, and test zones, along with devices and connections. This visualization aids in quickly identifying problem areas and understanding how systems are interlinked.
Severity and Problem Monitoring: The dashboard classifies issues by severity, from critical problems to warnings. Real-time issues (such as VM downtime or system failures) are highlighted, enabling the team to resolve issues quickly.
Performance Metrics: Graphs display performance metrics, such as bandwidth usage and CPU load, offering insights into system bottlenecks or overuse, particularly in critical devices like firewalls.
Impact
This Zabbix dashboard enables an infrastructure team to efficiently monitor network performance, manage resource usage, and ensure device availability. The clear visual interface helps quickly identify issues, reducing downtime and ensuring higher reliability of critical services.
Conclusion
The first page of the dashboard demonstrates Zabbix’s capabilities for centralized monitoring across large infrastructures. By integrating data from network devices, servers, and virtual machines, it empowers IT teams to make informed decisions and address issues before they escalate. The second page provides a detailed focus on the infrastructure nodes, ensuring that all critical systems are effectively monitored for optimal operation across the IT environment.
